OnlyFans

• 1. Introduction

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  OnlyFans, a subscription service based in London, counts more than four million registered creators and 370 million registered users. Yet the average creator earns only about $1,300 a year. That gap between an enormous crowd and a modest typical paycheck sits at the heart of the company's story.

  The site is best known for its popularity with pornographers, but it also hosts athletes and comedians. Everything on it is made by the users themselves, and fans pay to follow the people they like.

  How did a platform run from London become famous so quickly? Why did banks, lawmakers and child safety groups all turn their attention to it? And what happened when its owner died in 2026, just as buyers were circling?

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• 2. How It Works

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  Every payment on OnlyFans takes one of three forms. A subscriber can pay a creator a monthly instalment, send a one-time tip, or buy a single item through pay-per-view. The company keeps 20% of each payment and passes the rest to the creator.

  Creators upload videos and gather subscribers, so the service works as both a video hosting site and a social network. It belongs to what people call the creator economy, where individuals earn directly from their own audiences.

  Pornographic creators, both amateur and professional, make up most of the site. Chefs, fitness trainers and musicians also sell there.

  A 2022 study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior looked at who pays. It found the users were predominantly white, married men who identified as heterosexual, bisexual or pansexual. Their sexual attitudes were not significantly different from those of the general population.

  The company employs about 1,000 people, and 80% of them work on moderation and support. The business behind all of this is a firm called Fenix International Limited.

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• 3. A Family Loan

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  In November 2016, Tim Stokely founded OnlyFans with £10,000 borrowed from his father, Guy Stokely. His stated aim was to let performers "directly monetize their content and interactions". Tim had already built two websites, GlamGirls and Customs4U.

  His brother Thomas became chief operating officer, and their father took charge of finance. The early rules were strict. Explicit material was banned, and the company hoped to attract musicians and influencers. By 2017, the ban on pornography had been lifted.

  In 2019, the businessman Leonid Radvinsky bought 75% of the company and became one of its directors. Radvinsky already owned a site called MyFreeCams. The Independent wrote that after his arrival OnlyFans "gained a pop culture reputation for being a hive of pornography".

  The top job changed hands twice. In December 2021, Stokely announced he would step down, and Amrapali Gan would replace him. In July 2023, the lawyer Keily Blair became chief executive.

  The company Radvinsky had just bought into was about to meet a year that transformed its fortunes: 2020.

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• 4. The Pandemic Boom

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  Between March and April 2020, the combined base of users and creators grew by 75%. Sex workers, both amateur and professional, had driven the early growth. The pandemic and the recession that followed accelerated it.

  A single mention pushed the site further. Beyoncé name-checked it in the remix of Megan Thee Stallion's song "Savage", released in April 2020. Traffic rose by 15%. Stokely said about 200,000 new users and 6,000-8,000 new creators were signing up every day.

  Cardi B, Rebecca Minkoff and Tyler Posey joined in 2020, as did the media company Munchies. By December 2020, OnlyFans had 85 million users and more than a million creators. It generated more than 2 billion in sales that year.

  Sky News reported in 2020 that the company had not paid value-added tax for three years and could face heavy penalties. OnlyFans began charging the tax in July 2020, after what it called "discussions" with HM Revenue and Customs.

  By March 2021, the user base topped 120 million. Creators had collectively earned $3 billion, and the company said it was paying out more than $200 million a month. Revenue in 2021 was around $900 million, up from $350 million in 2020, and the company reached a valuation of $1 billion. Radvinsky received $500 million in dividends over roughly two years, 2021 and 2022.

  Recognition followed. In April 2021, Time put OnlyFans on its Time 100 Most Influential Companies list. Fast Company named it one of the 10 most innovative social media companies that year. The Financial Times listed it among Europe's fastest-growing companies in both 2022 and 2023.

  At one later count, the site had 3 million registered creators and 220 million registered consumers. In the year to the 30th of November 2023, revenue reached $1.3 billion, a rise of 20%. The company also paid $150 million in UK corporation tax in 2023.

  In October 2025, OnlyFans announced that it had paid out $25 billion to creators since 2016.

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• 5. Celebrities And Records

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  In March 2021, OnlyFans launched a creative fund, offering £20,000 grants to four emerging musicians in the United Kingdom. Stokely and the rapper Stefflon Don chose the winners.

  Later in 2021, the company soft launched OFTV, an app and streaming site gathering its safe-for-work videos. Floyd Mayweather Jr., DJ Khaled and Fat Joe, and Terrell Owens were among the creators who joined that year.

  A reality fashion show followed in 2022, titled Creative Fund: Fashion Edition and featuring the designer Rebecca Minkoff. Law Roach, Sir John and Maeve Reilly judged it. The winner received $50,000, and second and third place each received $25,000.

  A four-part Comedy Edition aired in the UK and Ireland in 2023 with a similar prize fund. London Hughes, Jamali Maddix and Mae Martin judged it. Jack Guinness hosted, and Sofie Hagen appeared.

  Also in 2022, OFTV released Model Farmers, hosted by Becky Houze, in which celebrities work on a farm in the UK. The company signed the Sims family from the English reality series The Only Way is Essex, and the comedian Whitney Cummings, to star in shows due in 2023. Cummings also opened an account on the main site.

  Individual creators produced their own milestones. In January 2020, Kaylen Ward offered free access to sexual material in exchange for proof of charity donations during the Australian bushfires. She raised US$1 million, and others copied the trend.

  Bella Thorne joined in August 2020 and broke earnings records, making 2 million in a week, including 1 million in the first 24 hours. She promised subscribers nude photos but delivered only lingerie photos, which led to many chargebacks. OnlyFans then limited how much creators can charge and how quickly they receive payouts. The company called this "an evolving process" unrelated to Thorne. Sex work advocates called her a "tourist" and blamed her for the change.

  Bhad Bhabie beat Thorne's record in April 2021, collecting 1 million in six hours. Critics questioned her subscribers, because her account launched shortly after she turned 18.

  Carmen Electra joined in May 2022, debuting with photos from her 50th birthday. The same year, the Pennsylvania congressional candidate Alexandra Hunt said her campaign raised around $100,000 in one month. In September 2022, the Twitch streamer Amouranth told Business Insider she earned $1.5 million monthly and had grossed more than $27 million since 2020.

  On the 9th of December 2022, the YouTuber Markiplier launched an account, and the flood of visitors crashed the site.

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• 6. Guarding The Gate

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  Before posting anything, a prospective creator must supply more than nine pieces of identifying information. These include a full name, date of birth, bank details, address, email, a valid government ID, a standalone selfie, a selfie holding the ID, and social media handles. Depending on the country, fans may also have to provide identifying details and documents before viewing media.

  Critics doubted whether the checks held. In 2021, BBC News reported that it could get around the system, and UK police criticised the company for not doing enough to protect children. Ofcom, the UK regulator, praised the site in 2022 for using third-party verification tools.

  A 2020 BBC Three documentary alleged that a third of Twitter profiles advertising "nudes4sale" or similar belonged to underage people, many of whom used OnlyFans. In May 2021, the BBC reported that the site was "failing to prevent underage users from selling and appearing in explicit videos". The reports came from UK police, schools and Childline.

  Numbers from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, known as NCMEC, offered a comparison. It received fewer than 100 reports of child sexual abuse material per year from OnlyFans. Companies owned by MindGeek accounted for around 13,000 cases, Twitter 65,000, and Facebook 20 million.

  On the 10th of August 2021, US Representative Ann Wagner announced a bipartisan coalition urging the Department of Justice to investigate OnlyFans for child exploitation. Over 100 members of Congress signed the petition. The Christian pressure group Exodus Cry and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation were cited as influences on the campaign.

  Later that month, OnlyFans published its first transparency report. It said machine learning classifiers and hashes, which are digital fingerprints of known abusive files, helped it find such material and report it to NCMEC. Yet in July 2021 it passed along only one hash and details of 14 of the 15 accounts it had suspended. Gizmodo and The Verge called the report's figures unclear.

  The company later gave the Child Rescue Coalition $500,000 in 2022. In 2023 it partnered with StopNCII.org, a tool that uses hashes to stop the spread of revenge porn and other non-consensual images.

  Reuters then documented 30 complaints in court and police records between December 2019 and June 2024. They involved more than 200 explicit videos and images of children, and some videos had allegedly stayed on the site for over a year. The Internet Watch Foundation called OnlyFans "an industry leader in online safety", and NCMEC praised its participation in voluntary detection efforts.

  In February 2020, BuzzFeed News reported that up to four terabytes of hacked OnlyFans material had gone viral, spread through Mega and Google Drive. OnlyFans denied any breach. Daly Barnett of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said such platforms routinely have "terrible security posture and reprehensible incident response".

  In August 2020, Forensic News reported that some creators' accounts had been deleted without warning, leaving them unable to withdraw their balances. It added that banks had flagged Radvinsky's earlier ventures for indicators of money laundering.

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• 7. Six Days In August

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  On the 19th of August 2021, OnlyFans announced that from the 1st of October it would stop allowing sexually explicit material. The change came through a new Terms of Service policy. Nudity would still be permitted in some cases.

  The first reports blamed credit card companies, including Mastercard. Stokely later told the Financial Times a different story. He said banks such as BNY Mellon and JPMorgan Chase had withdrawn support, and that Mastercard had "no bearing on the decision".

  Stokely said BNY Mellon had "flagged and rejected" each of the company's transactions. Metro Bank, he added, had abruptly ended its support back in 2019.

  Creators and fans reacted with widespread anger. Six days after the announcement, OnlyFans reversed course. It said adult material would be allowed indefinitely, because it had "secured assurances necessary" to continue.

  The scare gave a rival its moment. Fansly, which began operating in November 2020, surged in popularity among sex workers once the ban was announced. MEL Magazine called its design and functionality "nearly identical" to OnlyFans.

  A year later, performers turned to US courts with a very different grievance.

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• 8. Disputes And Succession

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  In August 2022, a series of US lawsuits accused OnlyFans of bribing Meta employees to add the Instagram accounts of certain creators to a terrorist blacklist. The creators also sold on competing sites. Performers such as Alana Evans said the false tag steered traffic away from their accounts, in effect shadow banning them. OnlyFans denied knowing of any such activity.

  The plaintiffs withdrew the bribery claim in July 2023, and the case was dismissed in August 2023. The court noted it had no jurisdiction over OnlyFans, which is based in the UK. In September 2024, Judge William Alsup ruled that the performers had not shown Meta interfered with their contracts or broke unfair competition law.

  Creators from Russia and Belarus reported being unable to withdraw money, or being shut out, after sanctions that followed the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. On the 21st of April 2022, OnlyFans "temporarily paused" Russian creators' accounts. It blamed "worldwide financial restrictions … limited methods to pay Creator accounts linked to Russia and Belarus", and later said it had restored full functionality.

  In 2024, several investigations revealed that many creators relied on hired "chatters" to impersonate them in messages, despite promising direct connections. Reuters reported that many also used chatbots. OnlyFans' terms of service prohibit chatbots and make creators legally responsible for any transaction with a subscriber. Two US federal class-action lawsuits, aimed at the company and at agencies employing chatters, allege that these practices defraud consumers.

  In December 2024, China blocked access to the site. A January 2026 Financial Times report found that OnlyFans models and other social media influencers made up more than half of O-1 visa applicants, according to immigration attorneys.

  The ownership story ended in loss. Reuters reported in 2025 that Fenix was in talks to sell to a Los Angeles-based investor group led by the Forest Road Company, at a value near $8 billion. In January 2026, Radvinsky tried to sell 60% of the company for $8 billion but found no buyer. He was negotiating with Architect Capital at a valuation of $3.5 billion when he died. His majority stake had been placed in a trust in 2024.

  On the 23rd of March 2026, OnlyFans announced that Radvinsky had died of cancer at the age of 43. On the 8th of May 2026, the parent company sold a 16% stake to Architect Capital for $535 million, valuing the business at $3.15 billion. OnlyFans said the money would let it better serve the creator economy while "maintaining its inclusive content policy and the success of its present operations".

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